Excel Is Still the eCommerce Powerhouse – Use It to Scale your Business in 2025

Today in the life of Digital Scientists, our eCommerce expert, Lucas explores how spreadsheets can revolutionise online product management, making workflows more efficient and freeing up valuable resources to ultimately scale your business.

Managing a large product catalogue can be overwhelming, with many businesses spending countless hours manually updating inventory, often neglecting automation that could save both time and money. This not only ties up staff with repetitive tasks but also diverts focus from strategic growth. If your team is still manually adjusting online listings within an eCommerce platform, few workflow changes could have a greater impact on your business in 2025, especially when managing many products.

Transforming Your Workflow with Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets can drastically accelerate inventory management by enabling bulk updates with ease. Whether it’s adjusting prices, managing stock levels, or applying complex formulas for taxes, margins, and promotions, spreadsheets offer unparalleled flexibility.

Most eCommerce platforms (including Shopify, Magento, Amazon, and eBay) support spreadsheet imports, making this an invaluable skill regardless of what platform you’re using. Imagine you’re selling across multiple platforms and have been manually updating each one: Learning to manage your catalogue via spreadsheets instantly unlocks a faster, smarter way to synchronise products across all channels, saving hours of unnecessary labour.

Many business owners and staff procrastinate on manual updates simply because they are time-consuming and tedious, but delaying these changes could negatively impact sales, causing lost revenue opportunities. With spreadsheets, these adjustments become seamless and instant, ensuring your products are always up to date without workflow bottlenecks.

What Can Spreadsheets Do That eCommerce Platforms Can’t?

Every eCommerce platform comes with limitations, but spreadsheets break these barriers by offering deeper control over your data. Here’s what spreadsheets enable you to do that many platforms struggle with:

• Bulk Data Editing: Quickly update hundreds or thousands of products at once, adjusting prices, descriptions, and categories with ease.
• Advanced Reporting and Analysis: Use custom formulas and charts to analyse sales trends, customer behaviour, and inventory movement.
• Custom Pricing Rules: Set up sophisticated discount structures, profit margin calculations, and automated pricing strategies that platforms may not support.
• Multi-Platform Product Management: Effortlessly compare and merge data across different platforms like your website, eBay, and Amazon, allowing for smarter pricing and inventory decisions. Seamlessly carry over data across platforms and databases, ensuring consistency and accuracy in your product management.
• AI-Powered Adjustments: AI can automate mass updates in spreadsheets using CSV files, applying rules based on prompts or data analysis. For example, AI can adjust pricing across thousands of SKUs based on competitor trends, auto-categorise products, or flag stock inconsistencies, streamlining workflow and reducing manual effort.

This is the definition of working smarter, not harder!

Simplifying Product Management for an RC Retailer: A Shift to Automation

Using one of our clients as an example, a retailer specialising in RC models and parts, were managing over 8,000 SKUs (stock keeping units) across a complex product catalogue. Their store featured a vast range of boats, cars, and miniature RC components like motors, ESCs, and trim tabs. With new stock constantly being added, or needing adjustments, manual updates became unmanageable for their small team. For example, when one supplier sent over their database, they may have updated SKUs, prices, product descriptions, among other adjustments. With a maintained database and backed up data from previous uploads, we are quickly able to open their master file and match up the new product data supplied to overwrite various product details without impacting other aspects that may have not changed, such as specifications. This allows us as a process to perform these updates quickly for import rather than manually updating listings one at a time which would entail many multiple clicks, data entry, as well as time reviewing and publishing listings one at a time.

Now imagine, on occasion, that your supplier informs you they made a mistake with their latest database and your team have days, if not weeks, manually updating listings. With an excel sheet, third party mistakes are resolved in mere minutes as you just quickly revert to a previous version.

By introducing spreadsheets into their workflow, the process of uploading new products from supplier price lists, often containing over 200+ new items at a time was significantly more efficient. Using formulas, we extracted key details with ease, applied pricing calculations, and prepared bulk uploads in minutes rather than hours.

As a result, new products went live instantly, reducing stock delays; manual workload was dramatically reduced, saving the business time and allowing staff to focus on more critical tasks.

With their catalogue running like clockwork, the business could focus on higher-value strategies like driving traffic, increasing sales, and boosting brand visibility. If you want an expert to take care of your product database and growth online, not only do our QuickFireSEO team maintain and improve your listings over time, we also significantly impact their performance and sales through multiple online channels. So if spreadsheets aren’t your strongpoint, you now know who you can partner with!

By leveraging spreadsheets, businesses can eliminate inefficiencies, streamline workflows, and uncover new growth opportunities. This efficient approach not only accelerated product launches but also freed up valuable time for high-impact marketing initiatives.

Automating manual catalogue updates saved both time and money, allowing the business to focus on growth and visibility. One key example was responding to community queries about the best products for specific RC model functions. By doing so, they positioned their products in visible locations while also building backlinks to the client’s site. This significantly improved search rankings, increased traffic, and boosted sales.

Sales saw both direct and indirect benefits, as the time saved was reinvested in outreach efforts. With our strategic guidance, the business maximised its impact across multiple fronts.

How Can You Correlate the Use of Spreadsheets and Databases to Grow Your Business?

• Keep your listings fresh and relevant with bulk imports, ensuring search engines favour your site.
• Up-to-date product data helps your site rank for changing user behaviour and search queries, keeping you ahead of competitors.
• Detailed, accurate product information builds trust, reduces hesitation, and leads to more sales.
• A consistently updated catalogue positions your site as the go-to resource, increasing customer loyalty and repeat visits.
• Quickly listing new products ensures your site is indexed before competitors, capturing early sales opportunities.
• Outdated or incomplete listings frustrate users - keeping them accurate ensures longer session times which impact search rankings.
• A well-maintained database fuels higher visibility, increased conversions, and long-term customer retention, compounding your success over time.

The sooner you upload content to your listings, the faster it can be indexed by Google, increasing visibility and driving more traffic, enquiries, and growth. This, in turn, generates more revenue for further expansion.

Furthermore, this approach can also be taken to managing large websites with pages, blogs and articles as well, allowing updates on mass across the whole site directory.

The below trending data shows consistent growth in clicks over the previous 16 months, the only fall was seasonal and came during the Christmas period as users shut down and enjoyed the festivities. Making updates on mass when listing hundreds to thousands of products allows you to hugely impact your SEO and growth online.

Our client's clicks doubled in the past year thanks to the extra time we dedicated to marketing and SEO while managing 8,000 SKUs.

Take Control of Your Product Catalogue Today

If you're exploring alternatives to Microsoft Excel for managing your database needs, Zoho offers a free alternative called Zoho Sheets, available within Zoho One alongside other paid subscription plans.

For those unfamiliar, Zoho One is a comprehensive operating system designed to support an entire business, giving you the ability to digitise every departmental requirement through to advanced workflow automation essentially moving your business to autonomous operation.

As Zoho partners in the UK, Europe, and the United States, we help businesses reduce wasted time and maximise profitability through smart workflow solutions.

From database management and bulk updates to seamless automation with the Zoho suite and other SaaS tools, we ensure your operations run smoothly, freeing up your team to focus on growth.

With 20+ years of experience in SEO and digital transformation, we don’t just optimise your database, we elevate your entire product catalogue, improving the performance of category, collection, and individual product pages for maximum search visibility and conversions.

Ready to streamline your business and drive real results? Explore our Fusion Flow team for systems and automation, or leverage our QuickFireSEO services to dominate your online sales channels.